<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
	<title>Upgrading from Big Brother to Xymon</title>
</head>

<body>

<h1>Upgrading from Big Brother to Xymon</h1>
<p>First, you should realize that this is not a fully automated
proces. You will need to do some work yourself - especially with
the handling of alerts.</p>

<h3>First step: Install Xymon</h3>
<p>To begin, install Xymon as described in the
<a href="install.html">Xymon installation guide</a>. I recommend
that you configure Xymon to use the same user-ID as your current
Big Brother installation, but have it use a different directory
for the server- and data-files. The default is to use <em>~/server</em> and
<em>~/data</em> respectively, which is unlikely to clash with the
directories where you have Big Brother installed. If you do need to
change the directories, you must edit the top-level Makefile and
change the XYMONHOME and XYMONVAR settings near the top of the file.</p>

<h3>Step two: Move the configuration files</h3>
<p>A couple of configuration files can be copied directly from 
Big Brother to Xymon:</p>
<ul>
	<li>The <b>bb-hosts</b> file, must be renamed to <b>hosts.cfg</b>
	<li>The <b>bb-services</b> file. You need only copy this if you 
	have used bbgen before, and added custom network tests to the
	bb-services file. You must rename it to <b>protocols.cfg</b>.</li>
	<li>The <b>cookies</b> file. You may not have this
	file - it is only present if you have used bbgen before and
	have setup HTTP tests that require cookies.</li>
	<li>The <b>bbcombotests.cfg</b> file. You may not have this
	file - it is only present if you have used bbgen before and
	have setup the bbcombotest tool. Copy it to <b>combo.cfg</b>.</li>
</ul>

<p>The <em>bbwarnrules.cfg</em> and <em>bbwarnsetup.cfg</em> files
cannot be copied over. Xymon uses a very different configuration
file for the alert configuration, so you will have to re-write your
alert configuration for Xymon. See the <a href="xymon-alerts.html">Xymon alert configuration</a>
to learn how Xymon alerts are configured.</p>

<p>Any server-side extension-scripts can be copied from the $XYMONHOME/ext/
directory to the ~/server/ext/ directory. You must also add entries for
them to the Xymon <em>tasks.cfg</em> file. Beware that many
scripts rely on environment variables that Big Brother defines, but which
Xymon does not define - in that case, you need to setup those environment
variables in the <a href="manpages/man5/xymonserver.cfg.5.html">xymonserver.cfg</a> file. It is probably easiest to
save this until you start running Xymon, and can look at any error-output
from the scripts.</p>

<p>If you have modified the webpage header- and footer-files in 
$XYMONHOME/web/ then you can copy the modified files over directly to
the ~/server/web/ directory. Note that Xymon has a number of 
header- and footer-files for the various CGI scripts that are not
present in Big Brother, so you may need to setup a few extra 
files to get a consistent look across your new Xymon installation.</p>


<h3>Step three: Stop Big Brother</h3>
<p>You are now going to move over the data files. To avoid confusion
about files being updated by Big Brother while they are being moved
over to Xymon, I recommend that you stop Big Brother now.</p>

<h3>Step four: Move the history logs</h3>
<p>You may want to save the historical logfiles and the history of your
status changes. To do that, move all of the files or directories in the <em>$XYMONVAR/hist/</em>
to the <em>~/data/hist/</em> directory, and all of the files or directories in
<em>$XYMONVAR/histlogs/</em> to the <em>~/data/histlogs/</em> directory.
If you prefer to keep them in the Big Brother directory, you can copy
them over with "cp -r" or "tar" instead of moving them.</p>

<h3>Step five: Move the RRD files</h3>
<p>The RRD files are used to generate the graphs, if you have installed
the LARRD add-on to Big Brother. Xymon has RRD support built-in, and it
is obviously nice to keep the historical data that has been collected over
time.</p>

<p>The filesystem layout of the RRD files is different from Big Brother+LARRD
to Xymon. Instead of having all of the RRD files in one big directory, there
is a subdirectory for each host holding only the RRD files for data from that
host. This is easier to manage, and also speeds up the graph generation when
you have many hosts. Unfortunately, it makes migrating from Big Brother to
Xymon slightly more complicated.</p>

<p>In the Xymon source-tree, you will find a script <em>xymond/moverrd.sh</em>.
This script moves or copies the RRD files from the Big Brother+LARRD structure
into the Xymon structure. You must edit a couple of settings at the beginning
of the file, especially to set the correct directory where Big Brother stores
your current RRD files (the SRCDIR setting). By default the script <i>copies</i>
the files over to the new structure, if you would rather just move them then
change to "OP" setting to "mv".</p>

<p>After setting up the script, run it and it should copy all of the RRD-files
that relate to a host currently in the hosts.cfg file to the new directory 
structure.</p>

<h3>Step 6: Start Xymon</h3>
<p>Start Xymon with the <tt>~/server/xymon.sh start</tt> command. Look 
at the logfiles in the <tt>/var/log/xymon</tt> directory (or elsewhere, if
you did not choose the default logfile directory when configuring Xymon) and
fix any problems that show up.</p>

<p>Look at the webpages generated. For the first few minutes, there will be
some missing columns and icons for each host, since it takes some time for
all of the tests to report a status to the new Xymon daemon. After 5-10
minutes all of the standard tests should appear.</p>

